BackAlleyBrawler

It will pick the closest color if doesn't exist in the palette the theme uses.

That might cause problems with changes to power customization sticking, but so far we haven't been able to reproduce it internally.

It's still not fixed? Hang on a sec...try now

Have not been able to repro this. All of the powers in Storm Control seem to be accepting colors as expected. Both in the power customization screen and in game.

Are you sure you've set those powers to use a customizable theme? Do you have the influence to pay for the changes? Etc

Nope, I figured out a method for applying different FX Geometry to the different player types, rather than slapping whatever was big enough for the Huge model on everyone else.

For what it's worth, the original design intent for the Blue mitos was that they would be very disruptive to clumps of players...to the point where they could not be ignored. In that regards, your description sounds like it's actually closer to the original intent...but I haven't really kept track with all of the tweaks and changes to those powers since inception.

It's already been said, but close to a year and a half after the feature was green-light. I couldn't tell you how exactly much of that period of time went into actual work on power customization. It was more start-stop as the tech was created around it, and we had to work on content for other issues. But, I believe our first working prototype powers were for Fire Blast and according to the revision history, that goes back as far as 5/15/2008.

There was also time spent on creating and refining tools and scripts to process the monstrous amount of data before we even dug in and started manipulating that data by hand. One of our programmers wrote a python script that parsed through power definitions, collected all of the animation/FX scripts associated with each power, dug in those and found all of the FX scripts and all of the particle scripts, copied everything over to a separate location (where they could be changed without affecting the original FX/Particle scripts), and renamed/relinked all of these things. That script alone made this feature possible. It took me literally about a week to manually prepare a single powerset consisting of 9 powers while the script could crunch through an entire Archetype in a matter of minutes.

Ultimately, we ended up with 1,200+ customizable powers (counting duplicates across multiple ATs), 2400+ FX scripts, and 6,700+ particle scripts. Every single one of which was at one point edited by hand.

As a feature, it's got a much longer history than even that. I did a lot of fruitless experimentation around the same time as weapon customization. There's also some code in the FX script for hue shifting that pre-dates Issue 8 (when I started). I don't know all of the reasons why Cryptic didn't want to move forward with it at that time or when exactly they made that decision, but ultimately we ended up taking a very different approach to the whole system.

[edit]I should have thought about this before, but all the work with the power FX/particle scripts was only one portion of this whole system. There was also design work done in terms of what the experience of customizing powers should be like, what the costs would be, how the interface would work, lots of back end work to store that data on characters, get those customized FX from the server to everyone's client, and of course the whole power customization window interface integrated into the new character creation workflow. Every player power definition was updated to reference these new visual FX scripts, we got new blend modes for the particle system to make using the 'dark' themes more intuitive, work was done to make customized FX work in demorecords, the list goes on and on. All together there were a half dozen people who contributed a serious amount of work into this system and as we approached the launch of I16 many more joined the effort to get it birthed.

And we've only done primary and secondary powers.

It's the same VFX as used by players. So, yes.

I just looked at them, and they're scaled appropriately for the female model.

Most of the issues with sliding animations should be fixed in the next patch. Let me know if there are any outliers I missed.

Bit disturbed by reports of issues with knockback and flight mode. Will be looking into that today.

Both known issues and already fixed in next update.

Number of known issues with the cardtrick and juggle emotes. All should be resolved in the next update.

We'll take a look at it.

That, good sir...is going to be my new desktop background for a while.

Wouldn't it be awesome if it you actually spent forever leveling up a character? As in literally forever? How awesome would the game have to be if for you to be willing to play it forever. And how super awesome would it that Death itself wouldn't be able to stop watching you play over your shoulder long enough to tote your soul off into the afterlife. You'd be immortal and entertained!

Although, I suppose if you're more cynical you could view it as some kind of eternal punishment. IE, replace the fire and pitchforks with an uncomfortable chair and an eternal climb to ding level 50 in CoH (undoubtedly on a really bad PUG).

(This post is all in good fun, and I truly regret that you feel the leveling pace of the game has become too slow for your tastes)

No! Bad! Standard code rant!

FYI, the tool that processes geometry exported into the game had a bug, and anything that was exported as an editable mesh rather than an editable polygon (go look it up if you want to know) didn't preserve the smoothing groups (again...go look it up)

Zero impact on performance.

Seeing as how the client is essentially free to download, I can't see how this wouldn't be legal.

You'll be fine. We won't tell anyone.

Fixing the bug required re-exporting all of the affected geometry. Likely some of it just go missed.

Let us know the mission, preferably with a /loc and we should be able to get those fixed pretty easily.

Erm, the dev digest (and community digest) has been working for a while now. Even has an RSS feed.

AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-HAHAHAHAHAHAAH-HAHAHAHAHAHAH

No.

I could have sworn I already fixed that, but I'll take another look.

As for free tailor tokens, my understanding is they plan to hand out 1 for each costume slot on Friday. Free tailor sessions, respecs, etc are not part of an issue or patch, that's something that's granted by Ops (I believe they have scripts they run on the database servers). They're probably waiting until the new issue is fully installed and working before handing those out.

I'm not sure if I would classify some misaligned FX geometry as a "fairly serious bug". However, both the female version of the metal spines and the misaligned FX for Ice Sword have already been fixed, they just haven't made it into a build yet.

The issue with the monstrous legs is a bit more difficult, and we're exploring some solutions that wouldn't require removing all of the spine geos below the knee.

Up until it was determined that because sharks couldn't leave the water that players would undoubtedly herd them up, lead them back to the beach, and then slaughter them for risk-free XP.

The idea of a ranged attack was kicked around, but after the friggin' lasers was veto'd that whole project lost a lot of steam.

From what I remember, that wasn't a game bug, that was the result of some hacking. Those players ended up getting banned

This unfortunately can't work. Player emotes work different from NPC 'emotes' (internally they're called AnimLists) in a crucial way that makes it possible for NPCs to have a custom weapon or custom shield visible

Wouldn't you?

I mean...uh...no, it was a fair fight